The Virtual Stage · Review
The Living Room as Stage: Sozo – Tower Defence in Preview
A premiere before the premiere: Sozo as staging, with your own room as the stage and the player as a stagehand armed with fists.
By The Editors · · 6 min read
There is a venerable, slightly disreputable tradition in London theatre life: the review after the preview. You sit in a preview, the set is finished, the third act perhaps not yet, and you write anyway, because a play’s intention is often clearer than its execution. With Sozo – Tower Defence we find ourselves in a similar position, only stricter. We have not spent an evening in the stalls. We have read the script: the studio’s detailed game description, which explains every rule, every tower and every screen. When and under what conditions the piece will take to the stage is open. This review is therefore a reading, not a review of a performance, and it consequently forgoes stars.
The stage is your own room
Tower defence is an old, well-researched genre. Enemies walk along a path, you build towers at the edge, the towers shoot, and at the end of the path stands something that must not fall. Kingdom Rush and Bloons perfected this formula on tablets; on the Quest there are titles such as Towers and Powers or Tiny Archers. Sozo does not change the formula, but the place.
The game reads the room scan of the Meta Quest 3 or 3S and builds the battlefield from it. Rifts open in the real walls, preferably where no door, window or picture hangs. A glowing path winds across the real floor, in serpentine curves around sofa and coffee table, up to the core crystal, which stands roughly on the spot on the carpet where you yourself are not quite standing. Building is only on the floor, on invisible hexagonal tiles of about ten centimetres. A tower is around seven centimetres wide. So you look down on a miniature world, like a theatregoer in the front row of the upper circle.
The crucial point: the same room produces the same layout in the same level. The stage is not a random product, but a fixed set that can be recognised and studied. That is a clever decision, because strategy needs repeatability.
An ensemble with clear roles
The cast list is manageable and well written. Malgrath, the Hollow King, a rift sorcerer, shatters the core crystal and distributes its shards to eight warlords. ECHO, a small hologram with dry humour, recruits the player as Guardian of the Nexus and explains the craft. A game of this kind needs no more narrative, and Sozo is clever enough not to attempt more.
Sozo does not change the formula of tower defence, but the place where it is played.
The real wealth lies in the repertoire: eight realms of twenty levels each, so 160 levels, eight towers with three tiers each, eight bosses, 48 enemy types, eight level modifiers and five difficulty levels from Casual to Ultra. That sounds like a catalogue, but the numbers have a function. Each realm has a property that changes the staging: in Verdant Hollow enemies regenerate as long as they are not burning; in the Necropolis they rise once again; in Neon Overdrive their death briefly paralyses the next tower.
The heart of the matter: no tower wins alone
What convinces us most about the script is a sentence the game sets itself as a rule: no single tower wins. Six enemy classes have strengths and weaknesses against six damage types. The ballista is cheap and fast, but almost useless against heavily armoured enemies. The cannon clears groups, but hits no flyers. The frost spire slows and makes enemies brittle, so that they take twenty per cent more damage from any source. The arcane obelisk deals no damage at all, but strengthens its neighbours.
And then there is the mechanism the studio calls ‘the rift adapts’. From the fourth level onwards, the game remembers which damage type has done the bulk of the work in the last few seconds. If one type delivers more than half, all enemies become more resistant to it. Anyone who stubbornly builds only ballistas will be punished. That is the kind of rule that saves a genre from monoculture, and it is more elegant than any admonition in the tutorial.
The player stands on the stage
Here it becomes theatrical in the proper sense. The player does not shoot in Sozo; the towers do. He is more stage manager, director and occasionally bouncer. He taps an enemy or an obstacle, and all towers in range concentrate their fire on it. He aims the beam of the prism laser across the floor until it ends at a real wall or a piece of furniture. He casts from the wrist: Meteor, Stasis, Overcharge, Mend.
And he strikes. Flyers come out of a deep hole high up in the wall and attack not the crystal, but the towers. You can swat them out of the air with your hand or the controller; a normal flyer needs three hefty hits. That is slapstick, certainly, but slapstick with a tactical function: anyone who does not fend off the flyers loses towers, and destroyed towers are not refunded. A note to take seriously: anyone swinging their arms needs free space around them, without lamps, shelves or pets within reach.
Where we raise doubts
A script proves no performance. Three questions remain open. First, readability: towers of seven centimetres, ranges of thirty to sixty centimetres and up to 120 simultaneous enemies on a living-room floor can produce a splendid swarm or a confusing one. Second, the body: a game played standing up and in which you lean towards the floor to tap tiles demands a good deal of patience from the back over 160 levels. Third, the pace: waves follow one another without pause, each 2.5 seconds after the previous one. For veterans that is an advantage; for newcomers it could be stress, even if there is a half game speed.
Against this stand a remarkable number of gestures of hospitality. There is an approximately sixty-second intro in your own room, a guided tutorial, one-off tips from ECHO, five difficulty levels and the option to skip a level after six consecutive defeats. Anyone who does not want to show their room, for instance when streaming, switches to VR mode, which replaces the room with a floating island in a themed world. The game is available in fourteen languages, and can be controlled with hands or controllers.
What kind of piece this is
Sozo wants to be two things: a serious strategy game with a counter system, armour, boss shields and an Ultra tier for the relentless, and a friendly fantasy spectacle without horror, taking place in your own four walls. Such dual natures often fail because they do justice to neither half. Sozo’s script suggests that someone here has taken both halves seriously. Whether the performance carries that seriousness we will only be able to say when the curtain actually rises. Until then, we note: rarely has a living room looked so plausibly like a stage.